Yale Goes Coed - 1969

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

Yale College was an all-male institution from its founding to 1969 when the first undergraduate females breeched its defenses. Women had been allowed into Yale’s graduate art school for a bit of cultural polish since the late nineteenth century, but in the undergraduate domain, the only women in New Haven were visiting relatives, girl friends, prostitutes, or strippers. It was an adolescent boy’s world with more than its share of ugly episodes. One the worst was “the gang rape of a prostitute in 1940 that was a running public joke during the Brewster’s undergraduate years.” [Kabaservice, “Kingman Brewster and the Rise and Fall,” 436]. Going coeducational ended the most blatant manifestations of Yale’s masculine culture, both in college and at alumni events.

In the first academic year of coeducation, 1969-19780, there were 1,025 men, and 588 women. The “freshmen” class had 230 women, but 358 transferring women moved into the sophomore, junior, and senior classes to spread women around, helping to set a new tone on campus. The Seven Sisters colleges, close to Yale in social composition and geography, provided more than their share. Of the transferring families, fully 124 were from just three of them: Wellesley, Smith, and Vassar.

In 1994, George W. Bush told an interviewer that Yale “went downhill since they admitted women.”